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Cyclo, the first and largest biological ship of its kind, is dying. A small crew of mercenaries have handed over the rights to their life to document the death of the ship, but the abandoned ship is anything but abandoned—one girl has been left behind.

Hana has known nothing but the isolation of a single room and the secret that has kept her there for seventeen years. When she meets Fennec, the boy assigned to watch her, she realizes that there is a world she has yet to experience but she is doomed to never meet.

When crew members begin mysteriously dying, Hana and Fenn realize that they are racing against the death of the ship to find a way to survive—unless someone kills them even before Hana’s truly had a chance to live.

Excerpt

He looks hard at me, which is unnerving. Can he tell that my skin is prickling in goose bumps? That I’m sweating under my clothes? I tap the table with my fingertips.

.. -.. — -. ·—-· – .– .- -. – – — -… . …. . .-. .

I don’t want to be here

Portia shuts her holofeed off with a glance of her red eyes, and sighs. “How long do we have? That is, how much longer will the Calathus survive? The last update said eight weeks.”

Doran pauses for a moment. “It’s now about three weeks.”

We all freeze. Three weeks.

Three weeks left to live.

It’s a strange thing, to see the rest of your life set before you in small, measurable numbers, like three.

“Now, remember that each you have objectives that need to be met before your contract is fulfilled. When you open up your holofeeds, you’ll find a progress bar for achieving your goals.” I pop open my holo, and there is a huge bar now visible on the right side of my screen. It’s fully red, showing zero percent completion. Doran continues. “And if the ship’s death accelerates, well, then, that means less sleep for you and more work.”

Three weeks, twenty-one days, seemed like far too little. Now, at the thought that if things go wrong, there will be even less time, three weeks seems like an eternity.

About Lydia Kang

Lydia Kang is an author of young adult fiction, poetry, and narrative non-fiction. She graduated from Columbia University and New York University School of Medicine, completing her residency and chief residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. She is a practicing physician who has gained a reputation for helping fellow writers achieve medical accuracy in fiction. Her poetry and non-fiction have been published in JAMA, The Annals of Internal Medicine, Canadian Medical Association Journal, Journal of General Internal Medicine, and Great Weather for Media. She believes in science and knocking on wood, and currently lives in Omaha with her husband and three children.

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